Wednesday, March 8, 2017

Camille Paglia on Trump: “He is supported by half the country, hello! And also, this ethically indefensible excuse that all Trump voters are racist, sexist, misogynistic, and all that--American democracy cannot proceed like this, with this reviling half the country.” NY Magazine, 3/7/17

In
fact, she has had to restrain herself from agreeing with the president,
at least on certain matters. “I have been on an anti–Meryl Streep
campaign for about 30 years,” she said. When Trump called the actress
“overrated” in a January tweet, “I wanted to leap into print and take
that line but I couldn’t, because Trump said it.”

She
doesn’t seem especially troubled by the rise of a certain kind of
outlandish vitriol on the right. When I asked her about Yiannopoulos,
she wrote back: “Too many gay men have lost the scathingly cruel wit for
which they were famous in the pre-Stonewall era. None of his satirical
jibes seem any worse than the campy insults that the great female
impersonator Charles Pierce had Bette Davis fling at Joan Crawford.
However, true reformers need to build as well as attack. When I burst
into notoriety, I had a 700-page book behind me and campaigned on a
detailed agenda critiquing both the Left and the Right.”"...